In total, DirecTV added 667,000 subscribers in the quarter, giving the company its second best year in its history, with a total of 1.9 million new subscribers for all of 2010. In addition to being the best quarterly result in ten years, the Q4 2010 results were also far ahead of Wall Street expectations for the period, and significantly up on the same period in 2009 (289,000 additional US subscribers versus 119,000, and $618 million profit compared with $32 million loss the year before).

President and CEO Mike White released a statement calling the results the capper to “one of DirecTV’s strongest years ever,” which might be behind a couple of interesting new plans the company has. Not only is the company is launching a $6 billion stock buyback program today, but White also said that premium movie VoD was under discussion with studios, and that tests might begin as early as mid-year.